We would often times travel back to my parents’ homeland. It was a sentimental activity for them. Seeing how it’s changed. Visiting family. Refamiliarizing themselves with the cuisine there, catch up with family drama, shop for items that were hard to come by back in the States, and enjoy leisure activities with the extended family.
I always enjoyed it for different reasons, as ignorant as that sounds. I cannot speak the same for all of my siblings, but it was refreshing for me get away from western civilization and live on the opposite side of the planet for a few weeks, knowing I would eventually return back. I got bored pretty easily, but I was also content with our home in the west. Which made these annual trips back home the perfect cure to my condition.
My younger brother didn’t quite enjoy it as much as I did. Foreign language, poorer internet, and different standards of living made the experience unpleasant for him. He was always the beast we had to tame, finding ways to satisfy his complaints. Thankfully, he could compromise to eating western food thrice a week, and some of our close relatives spoke English pretty well. Still, from time to time, he would gripe about how much better the States were.
My elder sister, on the other hand, enjoyed it just as much as my parents. Indeed, she was birthed in the same homelands as my parents, and relocated with my parents to the States. Only a few years ago did she acquire her citizenship in the west. Unfortunately, that meant she had to revoke her citizenship to her country of birth; a decision that was painful but necessary for her long-term residence.
As one may imagine, this variance in preferences made it hard to plan family activities. Often times we would split ourselves up, leaving some at my relatives’ house while the rest went out. Or we would go to different locations in one day.
Usually my brother would be the one staying back at the house. Sometimes he would go out if we were going to the mall. Or an amusement park. Occasionally we could convince him to come with us if the event was important enough, such as a family meetup.
My sister would go out often, but not to the amusement parks my brother was so willing to go to. She would follow our parents to see our relatives, eat the food, and see familiar and new sights alike. Sometimes, she would go out on her own, being younger and more active than our parents and didn’t have to rest as often. Every now and then, I would join her on these trips.
I was in the middle, I suppose. As I usually am. I went to the parks and the shopping malls as well as family meetups and road trips. I went everywhere, except the places I wasn’t at. There’s only one of me, after all.
I suppose I took some stress off of my parents, knowing my sister would at least have a companion in her self-arranged trips. Being a girl in my parents’ homeland wasn’t easy. Even more so than the States, which was saying something. Though my sister was independent and old enough to take care of herself, having an extra set of eyes and manpower, or, I suppose, girlpower, made the risks less significant.
And my sister enjoyed this companionship. I was someone whom she could talk to about her memories and experiences. She was a very sentimental person, and told a lot of stories of her childhood here. Sadly, I couldn’t relate to any of them, having grown up in the west from birth. Although she was the elder and I was the middle, we were still six years apart.
I still enjoyed her stories though, even if I couldn’t connect with them emotionally. With each story, I couldn’t help but muse about how different each of the homes were for the three of us. For my sister, it was locked soundly in my parents’ homeland. My brother, definitely in the States. The two of them were opposites; people born of different worlds.
As for me, I was a gray area. I experienced quite a bit of both worlds, having visited here on an annual basis since a small child. This was not the case for my younger brother, as my parents had to forego our family trips back home for a few years after his birth. One, because my mother had to recover from his birth, and two, our family had to financially stabilize due to certain circumstances well out of our control.
I would say my home would lie between the two, but that would imply the Middle East, which is not the case and has the wrong connotations in a conversation. But metaphorically speaking, I was both a westerner and easterner. Perhaps moreso western, since I reside there, but my interests were certainly heavily influenced by the east.
I guess, in the end, the emotional appeal of my parents and my sister were partially passed down to me, as I felt the tug of their homeland as mine as well. But at the same time, my feelings spawned out of the boredom of ‘life-as-usual’ back in the States. To me, the east was an exotic place rather than an old familiarity; a lost origin of which I was returning to explore.
It made me wonder who else felt this way as well. Surely I wasn’t the only one like this. And there are certainly many like my brother or sister. It was metaphorically resounding to imagine humanity split into the three camps of us siblings. Those who return home, those who are forced leave home, and those who wander, such as I.